We’ve been working on a graph/document database with these kind of collaborative revision-control features over at TerminusDB (https://github.com/terminusdb/terminusdb). I think it is the wave of the future. And interestingly we also came out of a European Commission backed project.
Our approach to distribution is to use delta encoding and succinct data structures. We borrowed a fair few ideas from Git. Might be interested to read our storage layer white paper: https://github.com/terminusdb/terminusdb/blob/master/docs/wh...
Conflict free merges sound fantastic - not an easy road! Good luck.